First Steps in Dream Creation

Home Articles Index Tell a Friend Site Map

CREATING YOUR DREAM VISION

Your Privacy is Your Right

and Our Duty!

We will never share or sell your information.

Magical Mirror Machine

Top Rated Guide:

Recommended Reads:

(Part I: What's a "Dream Vision" and Why Would I Want One?)

Part II: First Steps in Dream Creation

Your ideal life, when you get to the heart of it, isn’t so much about the action on the screen as it is about the music that runs behind that action. Let me explain what I mean.

When I watch a movie my favorite part is the opening moments that set the mood, the tone, for the whole show. My eyes can be looking at any kind of scene—people walking down a street, waves washing up on a shore, a restaurant scene, any slice of life, it doesn’t matter. It’s the music beneath the scene that tells me what the movie is all about. It’s the music that conveys the feeling tone, the emotion, the direction the story will go. Is it going to be tense and suspenseful? Filled with adventure? Funny? A warm and loving tale? A drama filled with struggle or conflict? A tragedy? Or a story of triumph?

When you set out to define your dream life, your ideal, it’s like creating a movie of the way you want your life to be. The props, the settings, the characters, the actions are really just conveyances for the underlying theme. And it’s that theme that gives your life continuity and meaning.

Finding Your Theme

A good way to begin crafting your dream vision, then, is to start by identifying the “theme music” that will play beneath, and unite, its events, actions and relationships. In essence, your dream vision isn't as much about what you do as it is about who you are. Your theme is composed of the values that matter to you the most, the character traits that show who you are and that you would most like to express through your personality: Kindness, strength, integrity, courage, daring, gentleness, creativity, spirituality, independence, citizenship and wisdom, to name a few. Your values are the driving force that defines your purpose; they're the essential source of your passion, the song that sings itself through all that you do and that makes your creations uniquely your own.

Writing Your Script

Once you are clear about your key values, you are in a position to write the script or story line that describes the life you would like to create. If you need to, write in a “turning point” scene that tells how the new direction your story takes once you begin to intentionally create it. The story line can include all the adventures you would enjoy experiencing, things you would like to do and see, the kinds of people and relationships you would find satisfying and enriching, the talents and strengths you would like to cultivate and express, the type of work that would draw on your interests and passions, and the kinds of contributions you want to make through your activities.

That’s a big list! But don’t let it intimidate you. It’s meant only as a trigger for ideas and to help you round out your dream.

Goodies and Go-Fasters

Finally, develop the setting for your story and kinds of props you’ll need to live it. The setting is your description of the locations where your dream will unfold—where you would like to live, in what kind of neighborhood, in what country or region, and where you might like to vacation or travel. The props are the tools and furnishings you’ll need, and your description should include the style of them as well as the functions.

Because we are immersed in a consumer-driven world, this final category of house-clothing-car-tools-and-toys is the one where most people begin when they think of outlining their wishes. But basing your choice of props on a foundation of values, in support of your ideal story line, makes the selection process far easier and more natural. Instead of ruling your values and story, material goods take their rightful place as servants of them, allowing you to appreciate them and to choose them meaningfully and with purpose and joy.

Dream-Creation Resources

The resources in this section of the Magical Mirror Machine will guide you in the first two stages of dream-development: identifying your theme and crafting your story. For the goodies and go-fasters, you're on your own! (Well, except for this one piece of advice, courtesy of my grandmother: think "quality.'')

Finding Your Purpose

1. In addition to the guidance in the excellent books listed on the left, try the method that popular personal-development blogger Steve Pavlina offers:

How to Discover Your Life Purpose in About 20 Minutes

Steve's advice is unfailingly spot-on. I recommend bookmarking his site and checking it often for exceptional personal growth tips, lucidly written in an engaging and direct style.

2. For a good list of personal values that you can play with to decide what matters most to you, click here. (It's a one-page .pdf file; if you need a free Acrobat Readers to open it, go to Free Adobe Reader.)

Assessing Your Strengths

If you're serious about wanting to know your personal character strengths, no better site exists for learning them than the University of Pennsylvania's "Authentic Happiness" site. As part of its ongoing study of happiness, the site offers a broad assortment of scientifically constructed interactive surveys you can complete to get a measurement of various aspects of your personality: Your overall happiness, symptoms of depression, current happiness, appreciation about the past, how persevering you are, how optimistic, how forgiving, and more. All the questionnaires are designed to give you increased personal insight, and you receive your scores as soon as you complete them.

In terms of developing a meaningful life-script for yourself, the questionnaire you will find most useful is a survey called the "VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire." Because it is made up of 240 questions, it takes a bit of time to complete. But the results will give you a very accurate picture of your greatest strengths, the ones you will find both easiest and most meaningful to draw from as you shape your life's movie.

The data from the surveys is collected for statistical purposes by the University, and you need to complete a free registration that will ask you for more personal data than you normally provide at pop web sites. But University research is highly regulated and your personal data is kept confidential and secure. Your raw scores are used in research, but the content of your replies to the surveys is not associated with your identity. Your privacy is assured, and seeing the results is well worth the time and effort involved in participating.

The site will keep a record of your scores in your private account and you can take the surveys repeatedly as a way of measuring your increasing happiness and changing strengths as you evolve over time. You may want to make a note to yourself on your calendar or in your planner to see how you have changed every three to six months as an interesting way to get feedback.

Creating Your Dream

With an awareness of your theme and knowledge of your basic strengths, the next step to developing your vision of your dream is attunement to your desires.

If you could do anything you wanted to do and knew you could not fail, what would you most love to do? If you could create the perfect life for yourself, what would it look like?

The key is to cast aside your ideas about what's possible and let your imagination soar. Creating your dream has nothing to do with your current picture of the world's reality or with your current understanding of your own abilities. Both are no more than sets of beliefs, based on memory and limited information. Your potential is, for all practical purposes, unlimited, whether you realize it right now or not.

The only question you need to address in creating your dream vision is what you would most love doing as an expression of your truest values. If your values are the theme music for your life's movie, what are the grandest, richest, most heart-satisfying scenes your movie could contain?

Everything you need to know to find your dream and turn it into your reality. Step by step. Click Here for All the Details!

Write your images down. Make a commitment to set aside 10-15 minutes of undisturbed time daily to relax and let your imagination dance with your dream vision, expanding it, adding more details to it, allowing it to grow brighter and more vivid in your mind. It's the most creative, productive investment of time you can make.